Looking at the game now, it's obvious that Quest for Al-Qa'eda became popular more for its core gimmick -- the online chance to right an off-line wrong -- than for its gameplay. Based on the Build engine, used in Duke Nukem 3D, Quest has a late '90s graphical look and feel, a grainy, boxy appearance out of step with the sleekest new games. Serious gamers probably dismissed it right away. (There were a few commercial titles to suit their tastes.)

Many of the creative works inspired by Sept. 11 had a similar amateurish tone. There was a Java applet that let you warp Osama's face, and Bin Laden Bowling, a Flash game in which one bowls down Taliban bad guys, and many such others. EBay was choked with Osama bumper stickers and other trinkets, and every day, via e-mail, one would get some new song or Flash movie designed to tell Osama what we thought of him.

But in the months after Sept. 11 and military success in Afghanistan, demand for these works receded. Jack Ives, the chief operating officer of CyberExtruder, a company that created 3D bin Laden and Bush figures for use in Unreal Tournament, says that while the figures are still in demand, they're nowhere near as popular as they once were. (Now, the company is using "the same technology that we used to create game characters to protect the security of our country," Ives said -- the firm creates 3-D visual templates of known terrorist suspects that can be used to determine identities of people at airports and other public places.) Petrilla, too, acknowledged that his al-Qaida game doesn't seem to be very popular these days.

When President Bush began talking about Saddam being next on his list, Petrilla saw a new opportunity to create a game. In truth, he says, it wasn't very difficult. It took him only a few weeks to build Quest for Hussein, since all he had to do was replace the Afghanistan scenery with Iraq scenery. For his maps, Petrilla consulted some pictures of Iraq; he envisioned Baghdad as a place with "lots of trash," he says, where "everything's run-down."

Petrilla concedes that his games aren't very professional-looking (that will come, he says, after he creates his own company), but he says they do offer a chance for Americans to let out their foreign-policy frustrations. Everyone knows that Saddam Hussein is a threat, he says. "He is a villain and Americans definitely don't like him."

Petrilla knows that Americans differ on how to deal with the threat posed by Saddam, but "I think we all want him out of power," he says. "Some people just don't know whether it's worth jeopardizing all those lives."

In this way, Petrilla makes a clever pitch in support of his game -- it's for both Iraq hawks and doves! If you are lusting for war, you ought to get this game because you know the full threat that Iraq represents. And if you don't want a war and yet you know that someone needs to do something about Saddam, Petrilla's game is still for you, as it "makes it easy by letting you get him on a computer screen, without any blood."

Petrilla's Saddam game is not the only new game to play off a possible war. In October, Gotham Games released Conflict: Desert Storm, which re-creates special ops missions from the first Gulf War.

The timing of the release of Conflict: Desert Storm could be called opportunistic, but the game -- which is $40 -- has been acclaimed for its depth and realism, and theoretically has more to offer experienced gamers than merely the chance to kill a dictator. Quest for Hussein, on the other hand, is, like Quest For Al-Qa'eda, only opportunism; from the moment the game starts -- with a screen of a weather report for Baghdad that promises tomorrow will bring a smothering, nuclear-induced 3,000 degree heat -- the whole thing feels a bit immature.

Immaturity might have been excusable in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, but as applied to ousting Saddam, it feels out of place: If you care enough about the threat Saddam poses to desire war, you're likely not a kidder about it, not someone willing to pay $4 for a game to let him have it. And if you don't care about Saddam and believe he's no threat, you won't get the game either. Even if most Americans do support a war in Iraq (according to polls), there's no societal groundswell of anti-Saddam sentiment, and unless Saddam does something to Americans on the order of Sept. 11, it's hard to see how there will be. Saddam seems to be regarded as something of an ineffectual evil guy -- the kind of guy who pops up in episodes of "Seinfeld" and "South Park."

Kurt Squire, a research manager at MIT's Games-to-Teach Project and an expert on games, says there's nothing new about video games giving people an opportunity to take on real-life villains. Games and war naturally fit together, and he notes that this seemed to be most true during the Cold War, when all sorts of American games positioned Russians as the enemy.

But Squire considers the new phenomenon of do-it-yourself villain insertion "juvenile and 'South Park'-ian," he said. There is some truth to the argument that "one of the reasons people play games is they want to get rid of their frustrations," he says, "but I tend to look at any kind of entertainment as a break from life. Is this the one way people may deal with the stress of war? Maybe, but I don't think it's the only way."

From a strictly business perspective, it would seem odd for Petrilla to go after Saddam when there is still no worldwide popular outrage against him. And in fact, Petrilla says, he realizes there are other opportunities out there, and he won't just stick with Saddam: "As long as the news keeps throwing me enemies I'll keep doing it."

What about George W. Bush? Internationally, many people think of the American president as being at least as dangerous as Saddam Hussein. Would Petrilla ever build a Quest for Bush?

No, he says. That's where he draws the line. "I don't think we need something like that right now," he said. "I don't think we need a Quest for the President."

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